Page 14 - Occupational Health & Safety, September 2018

INDUSTRIAL HYGIENE
Combustible Dust Explosions: Are You at Risk?
Awareness training, good housekeeping, reference to safety data sheets, and adopting best practice should, in combination, minimize the potential for an explosion.
BY STEVE OCHS
Think about combustible dust explosions and coal dust, grain storage, and flour mills immediately spring to mind because they make primetime news, but essentially any workplace that generates dust is potentially at risk, including:
■ Agriculture
■ Chemicals
■ Food (e.g., candy, sugar, spice, starch, flour, feed)
■ Grain elevators, bins, and silos
■ Fertilizer
■ Tobacco
■ Plastics
■ Woodworking facilities
■ Furniture
■ Paper
■ Tire and rubber manufacturing
■ Textiles
■ Pharmaceuticals
■ Metal powder processing or storage (especially
magnesium and aluminum)
Dusts are created when materials are transported,
handled, processed, polished, ground and shaped. Dusts are also created by abrasive blasting, cutting, crushing, mixing, sifting, or screening dry materials.
The buildup of dried residue from the processing of wet materials also can generate dusts.
In a 2014 New York Times article,1 the chairman of the U.S. Chemical Safety Board (CSB) stated that, “From 2008 to 2012, our board documented 50 com- bustible dust accidents [that] led to 29 fatalities and 161 injuries.” This documentation was published in the aftermath of a horrific metal dust explosion in Jiangsu Province, China, that killed 75 people and injured another 185. It also followed an earlier 2006 CSB report that cited “281 combustible dust incidents between 1980 and 2005 that killed 119 workers, in- jured 718, and extensively damaged industrial facili- ties.” Figure 1 shows global dust explosion statistics and specifically for the United States and China over an 80-year period; it is interesting that the same re- port2 shows that the issue in China is consistent with increased industrial output.
Specific OSHA regulations exists for grain dusts,3 but awareness training, good housekeeping (also sub- ject to regulations4), reference to safety data sheets (SDS), and adopting best practice (see figure 2), such as that proffered by the National Fire Protection Agency (NFPA), should, in combination, minimize the potential for an explosion.5
So, what are the conditions that give rise to an ex-
14 Occupational Health & Safety | SEPTEMBER 2018
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